Review of Gender and Age/Aging in Popular Culture: Representations in Film, Music, Literature, and Social Media

In a 1985 NWSA plenary session, Barbara Macdonald challenged feminists by asking, " [h]as it never occurred to you that ageism is a core feminist issue as you develop feminist theory?" (qtd. in Marshall vii, emphasis added).Over the years, there has been a slow but steady growth in the intersectional analyses of age with other axes of differentiation-race, class, sexuality, disability, and nationality-revealing how ageism both shapes and is shaped by broader systems of power.Existing research in this area spans from Toni Calasanti and Kathleen Slevin's Gender, Social Inequalities, and Aging (2001), which marked an initial push for a "gendered" approach to gerontology (41-42), to Margaret Morganroth Gullette's Aged by Culture (2004), which critiques the dominant cultural narrative of decline (10-12), and more recently, Courtney S. Thomas Tobin et al.'s "Intersectional Approaches to Minority Aging Research" (2022) has also contributed to this discussion.Gender and Age/Aging in Popular Culture adds to this pertinent scholarship and provides a thorough academic analysis, exploring the relationship between gender and age across different media platforms.By highlighting these associations, the volume emphasizes the need for intersectional approaches to further examine the cultural and media contexts of aging in the twenty-first century.Editors